EMBRACING THE WEIRD BECAUSE FITTING IN IS BULLSHIT

Walks past a pile of papers inexplicably left on the landing leading downstairs

I should pick those up. No. No. I can’t. It’s too hard. OMG life is so fucking hard, I don’t have time for ANYTHING.

Goes to brush teeth and sees toothpaste film coating the counter where she lays her toothbrush every day. It’ll take three seconds to wipe that up. There are Clorox wipes under the sink.

Sigh. No. No I can’t do that right now. It’s too much. I’ll do it tomorrow. Fuck, I need to clean the whole bathroom. Tomorrow. Next week sometime. Maybe next time someone comes over.

There’s socks on the stairs, hey, I should pick them up, fuck why is this so difficult???

Sigh.

*Cue existential and identity crisis brought on by socks leading to questions such as: where the fuck am I going with my life? and, Why don’t we have any aluminum foil?

Six weeks later….

I’m going to start another business doing something I love, oh and let’s paint the bathroom this weekend and I can totally start writing that book I’ve had rolling around in my head for a week. I can start a podcast too! I’m also applying for this job over here so we are going to have to upend our entire routine but it’s cool, I can handle that even though I have been working 70 hour weeks from home for 6+ years and have no memory of how to interact with people and I’m going to organize my notebooks: one notebook for all the books I’m going to read this year, one notebook for writing blurbs and ideas, one notebook for lists of things I need to know more about, one notebook for the TV shows I need to binge, one notebook for goals and big picture to-dos for the year, oh and we should go to Costco and buy everything in bulk, really stock up on everything, you know, like, aluminum foil, toilet paper (but only if it’s the puppy paper), and Sun Chips and obviously we NEED the giant tub of pretzels. I know we don’t even eat the bags of pretzels we buy but we will eat THESE because they’re in a giant clear barrel.

Today, while at a fairly popular chain restaurant, I had one of those moments those of us familiar with awkwarding experience frequently.

Side note: if your restaurant serves bread, you bring the bread. Constantly. Don’t assume I don’t want anymore. Don’t be stingy. And definitely don’t give me the hesitating “I’m not supposed to do that” look. You bring the damn bread.

So. We were waiting for our third basket of bread, I had placed the empty one the edge of the table as what I like to assume is the universal signal that we need more bread. Since we often forget to ask for things when servers come by, I was obsessed with thinking about how I wasn’t going to let our guy walk away without my request for more bread.

Our very nice waiter comes over and puts his hand on our empty bread basket as if to take it away, “Everything tasting good?”

I have a few of them-pretty useless ones when you think about it. Spelling is one example. I’m a killer speller and if it weren’t for my social anxiety I’d be entering adult spelling bees at bars RIGHT NOW. It’s not that I love spelling, well I kinda do, it’s just one of those inherent gifts I have. While this particular super power prevents me from being strangled in my sleep by grammar police and the like, it’s not particularly USEFUL in a broader sense.

Another one is a savant ability to identify supporting actors or extras in a show or movie and tell you all the other movies, commercials, or other visual media they’ve been spotted in. Again, useless. This power isn’t going to save the world, it’s not going to scrape the arteries of a heart diseased human, and Brainiac won’t be recruiting me any time soon. What it does do is make me insufferable to sit next to during Netflix and Chill time. Ask my husband. He’s a lucky guy.

But one super power I do possess, the greatest of them all, is the power of AWKWARDING. This power is so great, so all-encompassing, that I have to constantly restrain myself from making others look bad with how awesome my awkwarding powers are. It’s an ability I was born with, it wasn’t learned in Nanda Parbat, it wasn’t given to me in a ring by an alien, I was born with it. It may not save the world, but what it can do is relate, empathize, laugh, and all around just not give a shit biscuit what other people think. But that’s now. Growing up, it was a different story. But that’s the point here, this blog is intended to show you that even at 34 fucking years old, I’m an awkward nerd who survived (and continues to survive and thrive) childhood awkwarding, mistakes and miscalculations, painful silences, making phone calls and fucking up phone calls, and all around just adding to my repertoire of 1000+ things I remember doing that make me nauseous with mortification in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. Or any other time of day for that matter. The main point is, awkwarding is AWESOME. It doesn’t always feel awesome, but it is.

There are many directions I want to take this blog. Some are directly awkward. Some are indirectly awkward–like talking about my love of all things nerdy and geeky. Other paths are just random or I might think they’re funny. I really don’t know this blog yet. I have an idea of what it might be, but overall I realized that this blog is like meeting with a live human, I have to warm up to it, to gauge who it is and what it’s about as I go along. Eventually I will hit a stride.

Just a little something I made up in my shop to get this site started. Little calling cards you can casually hand to those who need it. It’s a pack of 100, so you might need to purchase more fairly quickly after your first set. There are a lot of “noisy” people out there.

If you’re reading this and the header image of this site is still a black and white photo of a city then I apologize…I haven’t gotten around to taking and editing a more personal image that I currently have in mind so you’re gonna have to deal with a stock image provided by the blog service. Mostly because I’m likely researching something regarding whatever my current obsession is, or staring at a blank screen and attempting to write, or adding things to my Amazon wish list, or hiding in a pillow fort, or eating my weight in whatever I find in the pantry, just general introverting and avoiding people. Plus, if I’m on here too long Netflix will contact me with that highly concerned email wondering if I’m dead and decomposing on my couch because I haven’t completed my 39th viewing of the entire series of whatever current sitcom I’m watching over and over.

If you’re reading this and this is the only post I have up and it’s been weeks, then AGAIN, I’m sorry, I’ve likely been paralyzed by the 13,000 blog post ideas I have in my brain and instead of getting any down here I’ve opted to let them pile up in my mind-palace in a theoretical pile on the floor in there. Much like actual papers end up on or beside my desk.

Additionally, as I just tweeted, it’s a little creepy posting shit when you don’t have anyone following you or reading your shit.